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Week29: Birthdays #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

All of us get to celebrate our birthdays, but not everyone gets to celebrate their 100th birthday and receive a letter from the late Queen Elizabeth II.


Frances Murphy, my husband's aunt,  was born in Cambuslang, Lanarkshire on the 13th of June 1919 to James Murphy, a miner, and his wife Mary Ann Pyne. She was the fourth of twelve children. When she was eighteen her father died suddenly of peritonitis. Frances, having been brought up in a religious family asked her mother why God had taken her father. Her mother replied " You are lucky. If it had been me, you would all have been put into an orphanage."

Despite this tragedy, Frances and her siblings thrived. Three went to university and seven of the remaining eight studied at college - a feat almost unheard of in a working class family at that time. Frances herself became a primary school teacher, but, in the 1950s, a cousin invited her to come and settle in America. After several years teaching there, Frances qualified as a Montessori teacher and was later asked by a group of wealthy parents to set up her own Montessori school. This proved to be a great success both educationally and financially. 

She stayed in the USA until she decided to retire at the age of sixty. Never having married or had children of her own, she made up her mind to return to Scotland. However, she found retirement boring. In response to repeated requests from her American pupils' parents, she decided to go back to America and resume her teaching career. This she did for the next thirty-two years!!!  She retired for a second time at the age of ninety-two, after breaking her hip in a fall. 

Again, she decided to return to Scotland and, after a few years living with one of her sisters, she settled into a Roman Catholic Nursing Home, which she called " a little piece of heaven". Her physical health and mental faculties remained remarkably good and she went on to celebrate her 100th birthday in 2019.

She always told her family that the Good Lord would take her when He was ready. This he did the following year, suddenly, just after she had retired to her room from having had her lunch.

She was found in her chair, her prayer book in her hands on her lap.



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